What did it mean to be mad? It meant that you had some idea, or wish, so important to you that you were ready to alter your perception of reality, or reality itself, to support it.
— Alison Lurie, Imaginary Friends (1967)1
A little over a month ago, I stumbled across a burgeoning cult in the comments section of a YouTube video. This one was delivered, like so many others, to the recommended feed on my homepage, a minefield of blaring clickbait titles and faces contorted like putty for maximum engagement. Yet my eyes fell on a glamorous woman standing serene and dignified, afro framing the faraway expression on her face like a halo in ancient religious iconography. From the grain of the picture and the Technicolor hues glinting off her gold jewelry, she looked as if she’d stepped out of a 1970s television set and onto my computer screen. It was called “The Playlist Finds You.”
I admit that this video only piqued my interest because I had expected it to be a doomer screed about the broken state of contemporary music consumption in the era of ultra-personalized everything, luring me in with an intriguing thumbnail just to turn it against me as a cudgel. But it wasn’t that kind of video after all. It was, in fact, an actual playlist — genre-wise, the kind of serviceable house you allow to wash over you when you want to simply exist in space without thinking especially hard about it — and it had found me, whatever the path that led it there.
If I was supposed to consider myself anointed for being served a fairly standard mix, the likes of which I field in my YouTube recommendations all the time, I didn’t know that until I looked down at the comments. There, I found thousands of people blessing themselves and each other in the name of music, good taste, and the all-seeing, all-powerful algorithm. In droves, they say the video feels like “being invited to a super exclusive party” and “bet everyone in this comment section is cool as hell.” They are “honor[ed] to be chosen, to be found,” struck by the beauty in no longer being the one to seek, but being sought, as if by some benevolent higher power.
Reading these comments, I got the impression that more of them were serious than you or I might hope. But they also made me think of an old Tumblr post that has rattled around my brain for at least the past decade, one of several classics that used to make the rounds in my early twenties. We begin with our funny man, daydreaming out loud: “Do you ever wonder if someone out there is listening to the same song as you at the same time?” Enter the straight man, hitting the reblog button with eager fingers itching to deliver the kill: “Yeah, it’s called the radio.” Ba-dum-tsh. It’s such a perfect setup one wonders if the whole thing was just orchestrated for the notes, like so many similar reply chains were back then and probably still are today.
I think this exchange has stuck in my mind for so long because, as a dreamy, frivolous individual by nature, I remember walking around my small midwestern town with some obscure Japanese bedroom act in my ears, thinking, “I know I have to be the only person listening to this in a 500-mile radius. But what if somewhere, right now…?” Every time the post resurfaced on the seabottom blue of my dashboard, part of me would feel a little twinge of embarrassment for being so susceptible to such obviously childish notions. I’m not sure what it added to my life to entertain the idea that a faceless stranger in the vast fabric of the universe might be hearing what I heard at that exact moment, even if no other part of our lives would ever intersect, but there was an odd touch of magic in the thought, and it hurt to see it dispelled.
We don’t even have the radio to play this role for us anymore, not in the society-defining sense that reliably allowed me to feel 22 alongside everyone else in the immediate vicinity and beyond. Just people congregating under a YouTube video with over two million views, complimenting each other on the pretense of rarified taste pedestrian enough to be successfully read by a machine, caught up in a mass delusion of cool. So if that post was genuine, I hope the blogger is laughing now. I am!2
It wasn’t long after finding (or being found by) The Playlist™ that a friend messaged me about the music video for “Virtual Angel” by ARTMS, the long-awaited reunion of five members of the juggernaut K-pop girl group LOONA:
I just tried to watch ARTMS’s new thing and my eyes still feel f*cked up like this video gave me an epileptic condition or smth
do not watch it, like it’s actually painful, idk what they were thinking
I mean, I wasn’t about to not watch it. I’d been counting down the days to this album for weeks. So I did the responsible thing and tipped my laptop screen halfway back on my bed, peering through my fingers and the inverted display at what, yes, was a potentially seizure-inducing whirlwind of rapid cuts, flashing lights and eye-searing colors. My first instinct was to laugh out of sheer bewilderment; I agreed that it was bizarre and ridiculous. Then I did the irresponsible thing and watched it for real.
That night, my friend went to bed nauseous. I told her the next morning that I had watched it three more times with no ill effect (I’m just built different, I guess!), but would probably stop in the name of good sense. I did not stop. An entire month has gone by at this point and I’m still watching this video. Send help.
ARTMS’s company Modhaus has since rolled out an edit of the video made for “human eyes,” which is a great compliment to the hardiness of my otherwise terrible vision, but I confess that the original cut is the one I love most, for either the right or wrong reasons. I love dizziness, its razor-thin tightrope between peril and transcendence. I love feeling cut off from the rest of the world, anchored by a separate, volatile gravitational pull. “Extremity in general is something religions can offer,” Kathryn Lofton writes in Consuming Religion (2017), “a feeling of removing yourself from the world so as to feel something about the cosmos more purely.”
“Virtual Angel” is a chaotic, arresting depiction of celebrity worship made literal, but it’s also a compelling indictment of fan communities, where the enticing tug of vertigo and its attendant danger is a taste everyone indulges. The devout are portrayed as pierced, tattooed punks, a typical analog for outcasts and people on the fringes of society, but here, the markings are all for ARTMS — etched across their arms, backs, and faces. Their devotion paints symbols on their skin, makes them visible in the one context that matters. Congregating in a pink cocoon of TV screens, clad in costume angel wings and VR headsets, they wear their love on their bodies.
In their orbit is a plain young girl in a school uniform who shyly hides behind a camcorder, recording their every move but rarely taking part. Her clean-cut appearance and meek demeanor, relegated to the sidelines of their gatherings, instantly demarcates a hierarchy: those committed enough to brand themselves (have a little seven in their display name) and those who will only ever consume what the real fans provide. At times, they embrace her, smiling and laughing. Other times, they take baseball bats to a car where she sits petrified, still smiling, still laughing.
Fan spaces are claustrophobic and treacherous, a lifeline and a death wish by turns, tenuous friendships forged on the basis that you all look not at each other but at the same star in the sky. You follow strangers no different from your idol for updates on your idol and toe all their careful lines. What does that make them to you?
Usami Rin’s 2020 novella Idol, Burning takes place in the mind of Akari, a soft-spoken high school girl who finds in a pop star her only salvation. Held back in school and at home by unspecified learning disabilities, online, she transforms into a gifted writer recognized and respected as a “superfan” by her peers, a provider to those less invested. Following a celebrity gives her a fixed target she can analyze from afar, the distance and panoramic scope of vision enabling her to read him with a clarity she can’t muster for her friends, family, or the world at large. “Phones and TV had a kind of grace built into their separation,” she observes. “It was reassuring to sense someone's presence at a certain remove, so that the space couldn't be destroyed by interacting directly, or the relationship ruined by anything I did.” As she catalogs the minutia of his existence on a blog and in binders of handwritten notes, her own life eludes her. Without an identity of her own to inhabit, she becomes a parasite to his.
Everything inside the screen is airbrushed and pleasingly weightless, but among the sweat and grime of the outside world, Akari’s narration renders the human body in grotesque, unflinching detail, turning a macro lens on every unwanted hair and blemish, things disproportionately condemned in girls. The inescapable burden of her corporeal form is a life sentence that only total absorption in her idol can alleviate. Executive dysfunction slowly gives way to utter collapse, and fandom becomes her one frayed tether to society — before even that, too, falls away.
“I’d believed it was my purpose in life to devote myself to my [idol], to give up my flesh for bone. That was how I’d wanted to live,” Akari narrates the last pages of the novel, looking around her at the wreckage her obsession has wrought. “But now, now that I was dead, I had no way of gathering my own bones out of the ashes.”
As “Virtual Angel” reaches its climactic ritual ceremony, we see the sacrificed bodies of ARTMS’s five disciples lying prone on the ground, cold, gray snatches of reality spliced between visions of beauty and rapture, their synthetic wings and human bones shattered. In the end, it is the schoolgirl who witnesses the holy messengers through her camcorder, shaken and alone in the aftermath of her experience, unsure of what she’s seen. Five somber crosses loom overhead, as black as death.
Since their successful lawsuit against Blockberry Creative, their former company, the twelve members of LOONA have scattered to the four winds, each pursuing their own fortune. ARTMS came to rest with Jaden Jeong, once the creative director who shaped LOONA’s artistic identity and now the CEO of Modhaus, his own company.
LOONA was a meme (”y’all telling me to stan some bitch named LOONA [...] I thought LOONA was one person, it’s a whole group of these bitches”) and a mass psychosis event, but Jeong’s high-risk vision for their concept also radically redefined the scope of what a girl group could do. The protracted one-by-one rollout of the group’s members took the cinematic worldbuilding popularized by male artists in the 2010s and, for once, gave it to girls, making them active characters in an immersive storyline rather than passive objects. In turn, fans’ rapt attention and intricate theories around the many subtle Easter eggs hidden in their music videos kept their view counts climbing higher and higher, boosting both their algorithmic pull and the type of organic community-driven engagement money can’t buy. When their plot ramped up and took a hard turn into a symbolic retelling of the Eve mythos, subsequent trends in K-pop music videos saw no shortage of young women sinking white teeth into red apples and defying the heavenly gardens of paradise.
Jeong, an atheist, has called storytelling the core of human nature and the seed from which religion grew. Religion, as we’ve seen, can take many forms. “Music is no longer just music,” he wrote, and songs that are just good no longer suffice in a competitive market. Addictive, “fandom-type music,” which uses symbols and layers to draw the consumer deeper into the artist’s world, sticks in the audience’s mind and forges an unconscious, highly profitable bond.3 In short, lore sells.
These convoluted narratives are less in style than they once were, maybe as a result of consumer fatigue as well as a simple change in tastes. And looking back, turning idols into actors in a story they didn’t write was never a particularly big change from the status quo. Ador CEO Min Heejin, an outspoken detractor of lore as a marketing tool, has noted K-pop fans’ insistence on “the ideal of a self-driven, independent idol. But it’s ironic that they idealize this yet welcome lore that seem[s] to treat them as characters. Aren’t these two opposing concepts?” When NewJeans sings that cutting loose an ex is as easy as “biting an apple” on “How Sweet,” their carefree kiss-off to toxic romance, it takes a second to catch their sly twist on the timeworn story.
Still, “Virtual Angel” makes me cautiously excited for the future of less prescriptive storytelling in K-pop, as does aespa’s recent comeback with “Armageddon,” which sheds the clunky virtual alter egos that have weighed them down since their debut in 2020 for director Rima Yoon’s sleeker take on cosmic horror and “AI dystopia.”
The conundrum of aespa, whose storyline imagines an alternate universe where an app can scrape everything you’ve ever posted online to generate a best friend that is functionally yourself (and where that app can be hacked), has always been the suspension of disbelief required to see their gangly, noodle-limbed avatars as a technologically superior threat to four real, living people groomed to embody unattainable perfection. The question of how an animated character can be beautiful is neither interesting nor a mystery, and these models, stuck in the same hair and outfits for years on end, fail to captivate next to the constant reinvention central to K-pop image-making. What I do want to know is how these stars do it. How every angle flatters them, every look, where the sweat goes under the spotlights, how they do everything so well or at least are trained enough to appear like they do.
“Armageddon” finally invokes the real terror of this concept, showing the members under surveillance, coming into contact with eldritch abominations and their own doubles, who’ve replicated their personhood to on-screen percentages of 94% accuracy and higher. You went against nature and breathed life into the self you projected online. Now which one is the real you? Could anyone tell?
Even as this very platform expands further out into the realm of social media, I find that question buzzing in my head every time I log on. I’m still not sure how to freely navigate or interact with content that so resists categorization as content, where everyone’s persona seems to come across at 100% volume all the time, including my own. What am I telegraphing with every tap or like or post? Who am I creating?
Virtual idols are still a hot prospect: the VTuber-style boy group PLAVE has been a force to reckon with on the charts, and Hybe debuted a controversial AI-powered girl group just this week. From a business standpoint, performers who can be deployed 365 days a year without ever experiencing pain, exhaustion, or the desire for a real life outside of work are surely a boon to an ever-moving, relentlessly churning industry dependent on the packaging of fragile human bodies as viable products. Somehow, though, I doubt their long-term staying power relative to actual flesh and blood. In the darkest part of an idol fan’s psyche is a malignant desire unsatisfied by anything but a closeup view of their god’s wounds, a rare, lovable glimpse to document and file, as Akari did in her binders, under a heading titled “vulnerabilities.”
Simon Cowell, progenitor of One Direction, American Idols and any number of other Western pop confections, recently came under fire for stating that “[e]very generation deserves a megastar boyband and I don’t think there has been one to have the success of One Direction in over 14 years.” There is certainly a thread of either racism or ignorance running through his refusal to acknowledge, say, BTS as that boy band; K-pop communities have obviously put it down to the first one. But do I expect a 64-year-old man who made his wealth on his knack for the old game to understand that when we love a pop star now, physical distance is the easiest part to transcend? That a megastar is defined by how they fill our devices and not the world outside?
“[P]erhaps the entities known as idols, which we have consumed through TVs and phones, were virtual this entire time,” Modhaus posits in their track-by-track breakdown of ARTMS’s debut album Dall. “ARTMS sings that emotions formed over the screen can be real, not just virtual.”
Eerily coincidental recent library borrow about a (fictional) religious cult.
On the other hand, someone is definitely listening to “Espresso” at the same time as you, queued up on Spotify against their will. Maybe even against your own will.
Machine translation.
This post covers so much it feels like a compressed, book-length epic trying to burst back to its original dimensions!
As for Simon Cowell, I think lucky stars should be thanked he's so rich now he didn't create some awful watered-down "Korean-esque" boyband to jump on the trend.